AWS releasing in-browser Query Editor for Redshift

One of the things that I really like about Google BigQuery is the ability to write queries right there in the web browser without having to install a hefty IDE. Sure, there are times when having the full power of something like JetBrains DataGrip comes in handy (source control integration, customisation, formatting), but sometimes you just want to dive in and write a quick query without any messing around. Amazon did this for Athena, which was really handy, but strangely never did so for Redshift…until now!

There doesn’t seem to be any PR on this yet, so I’m assuming it’s a brand new feature, but log in to your Redshift console, and if you’re in a supported region (and/or account, perhaps), you might see a couple of additions to the left-hand menu.

Amazon appear to be adding an in-browser Redshift Query Editor

Interestingly, I can’t currently get past this modal dialog, which states:

You can only query Amazon Redshift clusters that are dc1.8xlarge, dc2.large, dc2.8xlarge, or ds2.8xlarge node types. If you don’t have an available cluster, you can launch a new cluster from the Redshift Dashboard.

A couple of observations about this:

I’m running some dc2.large clusters, so a little strange that I’m getting this message. I guess it does say that it’s a beta feature, so some weirdness expected.

No ds2.xlarge mentioned. Why? Could it be (and I’m really stretching here), that Amazon have plans to deprecate the ds2.xlarge node type? I can’t really think of any valid reason why they would support all the other available node types (including the superseded dc1.8xlarge), unless they’re planning on removing/replacing it in the near future.

It also looks like there’ll be a way to save your previous queries (just like BigQuery, Athena, Hive etc.) so that you can re-run them at any time.

I’ll add more detail as things start to work and/or Amazon release more information, but for the meantime, has anyone else seen this pop up in their Redshift console? Are you able to use the Query Editor? If so, I’d love to hear your first impressions in the comments below.

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Solutions Architect at Indicia. More years than I care to remember wrangling SQL Server and .NET, now mainly AWS. Data geek, football fan, and Xbox gamer. Check out my gaming blog if you're into that sort of thing.